


Turnabout

by Rhianne



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Episode: s04e08 The Sentinel by Blair Sandburg, Gen, Gen Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:13:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhianne/pseuds/Rhianne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An gen, Jim-pov epilogue to The Sentinel, by Blair Sandburg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turnabout

It’s been a long, hard road back to health since the mess of Blair’s dissertation. Endless days followed by restless nights that I can’t just blame on the still-healing bullet wound.

I wish it were that simple.

In a strange, oddly sickening way, things at the loft are no different from any other time I’ve been injured on the job. Whenever I turn round Blair is there, fetching things for me when my leg is too weak to support my weight, making dinner, fielding all the phone calls when I’m trying to sleep; being the ever supportive partner that he always was.

I can’t fault him on that. I never could.

But the Blair that I knew – that I can still see in a thousand different memories over the last three years – is gone forever.

Now he’s little more than a shadow haunting the loft, gaunt, always serious and never, ever smiling. Constantly giving to me what little of himself he has left; the tiny portion that three years of associating with me and mine hasn’t already destroyed.

He never says it, but I know Sandburg, and I know how he thinks.

This is his penance, his jail sentence for the mistakes he made. Doomed to stay cooped up in the loft unless I go out, and only then does he venture outside with me, enduring the stares and the shouted comments. Never reacting except to reassure me that he doesn’t care what they think, that they’re “just words, man”. As if a man who has worked with words his whole life can suddenly become immune to them.

I know better.

For someone who spent three long years of his life studying my abilities, Blair seems to have forgotten that I’m a Sentinel.

His reassuring words are meaningless to me, because I can hear the hitch in his breathing when people he’s never met shout abuse across the street at him. I see the fine trembling in his hands as he reaches out to the phone, answering the ring even though he knows it’s simply going to be another reporter. I can hear his pounding heart when someone makes some comment about Sentinels to me, as if he’s expecting me to suddenly remember everything he’s done and get mad at him, maybe even kick him out again and leave him with nothing.

And there’s a part of me – a very large part – that is mad at him. Sandburg was a thousand different kinds of stupid for leaving my name all over his thesis in the first place; for not password protecting the document; for leaving it where Naomi, with all her good intentions and thoughtless naiveté about the ways of the world could get hold of it. For not telling me what was going on in time for us to do something about it, to stop it or at least for me to get used to the idea before the media circus descended around us.

But he’s already paid the price for his mistakes, a price so completely disproportionate to his crimes that I can hardly believe it. He threw his life away to protect mine, and just as he’ll carry the guilt of his mistakes with him for the rest of his life, so will I carry my own sense of responsibility for what happened.

He’s not the only idiot here. I was justifiably angry, but that damn dissertation had been hanging over my head since the first day we met, and it was so easy to dismiss him, to get so caught up in my righteous indignation that I forgot the lessons that Gabe and Alex had both taught me.

I forgot how to listen.

So much of what happened between us was as much my fault as it was his. I’m the cop here, a trained police officer along with Simon and the rest of Major Crime, and we all screwed up where Zeller was concerned. 

A rookie two days out of the Academy would have known that the infamous James ‘Sentinel’ Ellison shouldn’t have been allowed within a hundred miles of the trap we set to bait the assassin. There was no way the media would ever have passed up a chance to get close to me when they’d been trying unsuccessfully to get a quote for days. That, and Zeller’s subsequent attack on Simon and Megan, is solely down to my arrogance, and yet Sandburg is the only one paying the price.

For days after the press conference I kept expecting to come home from the station or from physiotherapy to find him gone. I thought he was going to cut his losses and rebuild his life as far away from Cascade as he could get.

But he didn’t. He stayed, solemnly facing the consequences of our actions like the honorable man that he’s become, taking care of me and my needs the way he has always done. 

But I’m not the only one who lies awake at night. I can hear him now, moving restlessly around his room by moonlight, packing away all the signs of his former life with nothing to fill their place, never complaining about his own losses even though I know exactly how much it’s killing him to abandon his dreams.

The phone rings then, and Blair and I both share a muffled curse as the answer machine kicks in. As expected it’s yet another reporter wanting just five minutes of his time. That’s the difference since the press conference. Before, the media wanted to speak to both of us, the Sentinel and the scientist who had discovered and trained him, but Blair gave me my life back, and now they only want to speak to the fraud, hounding him every hour of the day and night.

The message clicks off and I hear Blair sigh softly before going back to his boxes. I sit up in bed and do something that I should have done a long time ago, leaning over and taking my handset off the hook. There’ll be no more messages from reporters tonight – he’s dealt with them alone for far too long.

Besides, the only phone call that I’ve been waiting for has already come through, and I know that there’s a badge waiting for him at the station tomorrow.

Pulling on a robe over my boxers, I head downstairs with my cane, taking the stairs slowly, with awkward, halting steps before finally reaching the kitchen and beginning to make some of Blair’s favorite tea. 

He’s been looking after me since the day we met, and now it’s time I return the favor.

If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll prove to him that he’s not alone.


End file.
